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Why I'm Generation Claire Danes

For me, it starts with the crumple face. When she was a teenager, acting out my realities (pimples, friendship drama) and fantasies (making out with Jordan Catalano in the boiler room) as Angela Chase on My So-Called Life,Claire Danes would routinely let her face smush into a purplish knot. Her otherwise soigné features contorted into something ugly, something real, and I couldn’t turn away. At the time, I spent lots of hours in front of a mirror crying—I too was a teenage girl, Claire’s age almost exactly—and to see my own experience reflected on the television screen felt revelatory. I’m not alone in appreciating this quality—in profiles of Claire, her crumple face is usually invoked several times, as if she were the only actress in the history of the world to cry realistically, but it’s the truth. She wasn’t interested only in the pretty parts of the story. She wasn’t Jo March, brilliant and ambitious, she was Beth, plain and doomed. Who among us didn’t feel doomed for a thousand reasons between the ages of fourteen and 20?

I have no idea how old some actresses are—Drew Barrymore, famous since childhood, is impossible to place in time. In real life, Barrymore is somehow only five years older than I am, just four years older than Claire, but she exists on another plane of reality. Claire—I feel presumptuous calling her that, but absurd calling her by her last name—came to her fame at a far more precarious moment, in flux between childhood and adulthood. She was awkward and soft-faced, clearly not yet fully formed. Claire was one of us, immediately anchored in time and space. She could have been sitting next to me in math class, both of us staring dreamily out the window. If I’d been in a different classroom in a different neighborhood, she might have been. We were both New York City girls, and there were always people who claimed to know her, to be friends with her, the way I’m sure girls ten years younger than me are boasting about having bummed a cigarette off Lena Dunham when they were in high school. Proximity to fame is intoxicating, but proximity to talent is even better.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t know or care about Claire’s personal life. It makes me embarrassed, not because I feel guilty when I read Us Weekly (because I don’t), but because it feels different than that. Unlike with some famous people, thinking about Claire’s private life feels like snooping on an acquaintance’s Instagram feed, one full of fun parties to which you weren’t invited, but one where you recognize enough people in the background to wonder why you weren’t, to think, oh maybe, just maybe, someday you’ll know each other better and then she’ll tell you a story about that party and you’ll know who else was there but will have to pretend not to, in order not to seem like a creepy stalker. Claire seems to have been able to avoid the paparazzi, to live a normal life. Maybe it’s not just her contemporaries who empathize with her—maybe there’s some larger message being beamed out into the universe, like a bat-signal of empathy that makes people want to leave her alone. She’s one of us, it says, blinking into the sky. Don’t mess with her.

It’s also in the timing—I got married, Claire got married. Claire had a baby, and I had a baby. It’s not hard for me to see her as a fully grown woman, because it’s not hard to see myself as a fully grown woman. She’s been busy just as I’ve been busy, transforming from teenagers into young adults and then into whatever we are now. Not young, precisely, not in the first real bloom, but not yet middle-aged. We’re in another transitional phase, Claire and I, moving through our lives at the same rate. If we were to sit down and have tea, there would be a lot to talk about. Our handsome husbands, our beautiful sons. All that we’ve already accomplished, and all that we still want to do. I’d be interested in hearing her side of that conversation.

There are thousands of beautiful actresses in the world, women who look great in evening gowns and close-ups, their chins never wobbling, their eyes never puffy. I don’t think our Claire would have any interest in being one of them, no more than she’d like to be forever frozen in her transcendently giddy and wonderful Gap commercial, where she dances around with Patrick Wilson, making khakis look more fun than they have ever looked before or since. That’s why we love her—she gives it to us straight, good or bad, just like a real friend would. Sometimes life gets ugly, and she’ll take us there, unafraid.

What do I really know about Claire? Very little. I know who she’s married to—Hugh Dancy, of course—and that she went to a school near where I grew up, and that she’s friends with the novelist Michael Cunningham. She doesn’t overshare the way some of us do, at least not in public. She seems, to my eye, to be a remarkably hardworking young woman who could just as easily apply her efforts to another discipline. I can imagine her being a wonderful college professor, her expressive face bringing new life to Romantic poetry, or perhaps an eager docent at a museum, whispering her thoughts on the masterpieces on display. It’s that unironic diligence that moves me most, her obvious enthusiasm to do good work. Luckily for us, Claire chooses to share her crumple face and her elegant face and all her faces in between. It’s just what we all would like to think we’re capable of, professionalism kissed by something better, a hint of the sublime.